Bridges (2009)

Bridges is a collaborative woman-centered performance that stitches individual creative responses into a patchworked discourse. Using our bodies as evidence of multiple crossings, we engage in a radical praxis that seeks to uncover and interrogate the stakes behind reclamation and reimagining. How does memory – inscripted in flesh – traverse rugged historical and generational terrains? How do acts of memory making constitute knowledge production? And, what role does the unknown – embodied in acts of the sacred, desire, and experimentation – play in our imaginings of present and future possibilities?

This performance honors a legacy of womanist scholar-activist- artists. We draw upon a historical foundation from Cherrie Moruga & Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color to M. Jacqui Alexander’s recent Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred to excavate how memory becomes a powerful mechanism by which women and peoples of color bridge themes of community, love and survival across time and space. What have we learned from before that contributes to our flourishing in the now? How do our contemporary practices draw upon historical ones? How do we approach our memories of history with hope and moral optimism rather than a stinging cynicism that paralyzes us from imagining productive change?